2 Sides of Bombing Suspect Are Depicted as Trial Opens

By JO THOMAS

Published: November 4, 1997

DENVER, Nov. 3—
Terry L. Nichols worked ''side by side'' with Timothy J. McVeigh to prepare the bomb that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, prosecutors charged today as they opened their case against him before a Federal Court jury here.

But Mr. Nichols's lawyer said his client had had nothing to do with the bomb plot and had merely been trapped by the deceit of his friend Mr. McVeigh and by a web of misleading circumstantial evidence.

Larry A. Mackey, the lead prosecutor, told jurors that the deceit was all on the part of Mr. Nichols.

When the bomb went off at at 9:02 A.M. on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, Terry Nichols was at home in Kansas, ''home and at a very safe distance,'' Mr. Mackey said.

''Terry Nichols had planned it just that way,'' Mr. Mackey said.

While Mr. Mackey did not accuse Mr. Nichols of joining Mr. McVeigh on his trip to Oklahoma City to detonate the bomb, he said Mr. Nichols had been actively involved in the plotting of the attack and the building of the bomb.

Mr. McVeigh was convicted on identical charges of murder and conspiracy by a jury in June and sentenced to death by Judge Richard P. Matsch of Federal District Court, who is also presiding over this trial.

The case outlined by Mr. Mackey today is broader than the case against Mr. McVeigh and includes previously undisclosed evidence.

Prosecutors are expected to present evidence about the bomb's construction and about a robbery in Arkansas that they say helped finance the plot. Another new accusation is that Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Nichols got together shortly after Mr. McVeigh arrived in Kansas on April 13, six days before the bombing. In Mr. McVeigh's trial, prosecutors had only presented telephone records that they said showed the two men had talked in the days before the bombing.

When Mr. Nichols was first interviewed by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation on April 21, two days after the bombing, Mr. Mackey said, he told them that he had not heard from Mr. McVeigh for months before receiving a telephone call from him on April 16, which was Easter Sunday.

Mr. Nichols, who was living in Herington, a small town south of Fort Riley, where the two men had been stationed together in the Army, told the F.B.I. that he had written his old friend a letter at his address in Kingman, Ariz., months earlier. In it, he asked him to pick up a television set from Mr. Nichols's former wife, Lana Padilla, who was living in Las Vegas, Nev., a short distance from Kingman, and bring it to Kansas the next time he came, Mr. Mackey said.

On Easter, Mr. Nichols said, Mr. McVeigh called from Oklahoma City to say he had the television but his car had broken down. Mr. Nichols said he went there to pick him up.

Today, Mr. Mackey said the Government would disprove Mr. Nichols's story that he did not see Mr. McVeigh before Easter, by producing a receipt for an oil filter purchased by Mr. McVeigh at a Wal-Mart in Arkansas City, Kan., near the Oklahoma state line, shortly before 6 P.M. on Thursday, April 13. Mr. McVeigh had checked out of his Kingman motel room the day before, driving hard, and his 1983 Pontiac station wagon was having engine trouble by the time he got to Kansas.

On the following day, however, when Mr. McVeigh arrived at a Firestone store in Junction City, Kan., Mr. Mackey said, smoke was pouring out of the engine and Mr. McVeigh exchanged his ruined car and $250 for a 1977 Mercury Marquis, purchased from the manager of the store.

Mr. McVeigh then had no use for the new oil filter, Mr. Mackey said, and Mr. Nichols tried to return it to a local Wal-Mart on Saturday, April 15. The receipt was found in Mr. Nichols's wallet. On it were two fingerprints: one from Mr. Nichols and one from Mr. McVeigh.

For the first time, prosecutors will try to present witnesses and evidence that Mr. Nichols and Mr. McVeigh built the bomb at Geary State Lake and Park, north of Mr. Nichols's home in Herington, the day before the bombing.

But Michael E. Tigar, the lead lawyer for Mr. Nichols, told the jury in his opening statement that ''Terry Nichols was building a life, not a bomb.''

''Can you see my hand?'' Mr. Tigar asked the jurors, who stared at his raised palm. ''Not until I've turned it over, and you've seen both sides.''

Mr. Nichols, he argued, was one of many friends betrayed by Mr. McVeigh. ''Terry Nichols is innocent,'' he said, ''and there are innocent explanations for actions the Government intends to paint as sinister, such as the purchase of a telephone debit card under the pseudonym 'Daryl Bridges.' ''

Government investigators reconstructed telephone records from the card to track calls made by Mr. Nichols and Mr. McVeigh.

When Mr. Nichols bought the debit card in 1993, Mr. Tigar said, he needed it because he was living with his brother, James, on the family farm in Michigan. The family had no long-distance service.

The Government will seek to link that debit card to telephone calls made to potential sources of bomb ingredients in the months before the bombing, Mr. Mackey said today. They include 30 calls to chemical companies and auto race tracks that sold racing fuel.

On Oct. 19, 1994, a security camera in a coin shop in Wichita, Kan., photographed Mr. Nichols shortly before five telephone calls, billed to the card, were made from a pay telephone across the street to companies that sold barrels, Mr. Mackey said. Plastic barrels were used to hold the ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane that the Government says were used to make the bomb.

Mr. Mackey said today that the Government would attempt to link the plastic barrels from Mr. Nichols's garage to shards of plastic found near the scene of the bombing.

''When Timothy McVeigh built the bomb, he may have used plastic barrels to use the explosive mixture,'' Mr. Tigar countered in his opening statement. ''But eight million of them are made every year by a single manufacturer,'' and they are recycled again and again.

Mr. Mackey also told the jury that one of Mr. Nichols's fingerprints was found on blasting caps in a storage unit that Mr. McVeigh rented in Kingman, Ariz., shortly after the robbery of a storage shed in a quarry in Marion, Kan.

Prosecutors say the robbery was committed by Mr. Nichols and Mr. McVeigh and contend that a cordless drill found in the Nichols home was used to drill open the padlocks.

In what is likely to be a broad theme of the defense, Mr. Tigar ridiculed the analysis of the tool marks on the only padlock found at the scene and served notice that he would challenge the Government's forensic evidence as ''junk science.'' He said he also intended to challenge the methods of the F.B.I. laboratory in Washington.